"If you lecture once a year for a short course, I am sure you will derive advantage from it. A short practice of lecturing is a rehearsal of what you may afterwards publish, and teaches you by the contact with pupils how to instruct, and in what you are obscure. A little of this will improve your power, perhaps as an author. Then, as you are pursuing a path of original and purely independent discovery and observation, it increases much your public usefulness in a science so unavoidably controversial to have thrown over you the _moral protection_ of being in a public and responsible situation, connected with a body like King's College. But then you must stipulate that you are to be free to travel, and must only be bound to give one short course annually." Truly those must have been halcyon days for professors! The journal also proves, by its brief account of a Scotch festival, which accords with little hints dropped elsewhere in it or in letters, that our forefathers, not wholly excluding men of science, some sixty years ago habitually consumed much more "strong drink" than would be considered correct at the present day:-- "It was just an Angus set-to of the old _régime_. They arrived at half-past six o'clock and waited dinner one hour. Gentlemen rejoined the ladies at half-past twelve o'clock! They, in the meantime, had had tea, and a regular supper laid out in the drawing-room. After an hour with the ladies they returned to the dining-room to supper at half-past one o'clock, and my father left them at half-past two o'clock! The ladies did not go to _this_ supper." The journal, in short, like the well-known Scotch dish, affords a great deal of "confused feeding" of a pleasant sort, but no samples of love-making. The nearest approach to it is in the following passage, which is worth quoting, not for that reason, but as incidentally disclosing the strength of the author's character:-- "I shall write a few words before I get into the steamboat just to tranquillise my mind a little, after reading several controversial articles by Elie de Beaumont and others against my system. If I find myself growing too warm or annoyed at such hostile demonstrations I shall always retreat to you. You will be my harbour of peace to retire to, and where I may forget the storm. I know that by persevering steadily I shall some years hence stand very differently from where I now am in science; and my only danger is the being impatient, and tempted to waste my time on petty controversies and quarrels about the priority of the discovery of this or that fact or theory."[52]